Gerardo Giardiello
Gerardo Giardiello holds a Master Degree in Computer Science from the University of Florence in 2004.
From 2007 he worked as researcher or collaborator at a spin off of the Italian CNR (National Research Council), at the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the CNR and, currently, at the Institute of Legal Informatics and Judicial Systems of the CNR.
He conducts research and software implementation in the fields of legislative drafting, ontologies and knowledge representation, legal document classification and metadata extraction for legal texts analysis and consolidation, analysis of the quality of legal texts and implementation of e-justice services and tools.
In this domain, he has been involved in several national and european ICT projects on eGovernment and eJustice, with particular focus on international cooperation on cross-border judicial procedures; with the use of innovative technology such as eDelivery, eSignature and eID:
• e-SENS (Electronic Simple European Networked Services);
• EXEC (Electronic Xchange of e-Evidences with e-CODEX);
• i-SUPPORT (Case Management and Communication System for the Recovery Abroad of Maintenance);
• CARE (Citizens consular Assistance Regulation in Europe);
• e-CODEX (e-Justice Communication via Online Data EXchange).
In his current assignment, he is working on a piloting of the exchange of digital evidence across Member States by using the Evidence Exchange Standard Package Application, within the EXEC-II european project.
Sessions
In a recent EU publication, a report commissioned by the European Union related to the Cross-border Digital Criminal Justice environment, a set of specific business needs have been identified. Some of the most relevant ones have been:
The interoperability across different systems needs to be ensured.
The stakeholders need to easily manage the data and ensure its quality, allowing them to properly make use of it (e.g. use the data as evidence in a given case).
The stakeholders investigating a given case should be able to identify links between cross-border cases. Therefore, solutions are needed to allow the stakeholder to search and find relevant information they need for the case they are handling.
The study presents a set of solutions to address the highlighted needs, including:
- Judicial Cases Cross-Check (Evidence standard representation is suitable)
A Judicial Cases Cross-Check system should provide a tool being able to search for case-related information and identify links among cases that are being investigated in other Member States or by JHA agencies and EU bodies.
To facilitate the development of the above solution, a standard representation of the metadata and data of the Evidence should be adopted. In particular the ontology UCO/CASE, dedicated to the digital forensic domain, seems the most promising one to this aim. UCO/CASE, that stands for Unified Cyber Ontology / Cyber-investigation Analysis Standard Expression, provides a structured specification for representing information that are analysed and exchanged during investigations involving digital evidence. To perform digital investigations effectively, there is a pressing need to harmonise how information relevant to cyber-investigations is represented and exchanged. CASE enables the merge of information from different data sources and forensic tool outputs to allow more comprehensive and cohesive analysis. All these metadata represented in a standard format, could be provided to any potential stakeholder using a decentralised repository of metadata along with a suitable level of confidentiality and integrity.
The INSPECTr project (inspectr-project.eu) opted for the open-source UCO/CASE ontology to serve as a standard for interchange, interoperability, and analysis of investigative information.